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In my experience, background doesn't tell you if someone's passionate. Spending a few minutes talking about their (as well as your own) side projects and what t
by c16 4y ago
In my experience, background doesn't tell you if someone's passionate. Spending a few minutes talking about their (as well as your own) side projects and what they've been spending their evenings working on / reading about and seeing them light up is a big indicator for me.
Not everyone will do side projects - and that's fine - but passionate engineers will have something to get excited about without needing to think about it.
- lapcat 4y agoPassionate about what? If they're more passionate about their side projects than about the work you're paying them to do, that seems like trouble.
- dc-programmer 4y agoDefinitely not a hypothetical scenario. I’ve seen this play out poorly before where work work takes a cognitive and priority backseat to outside work. I do think passion in a more abstract sense is a strong signal thorough. Such as passion for learning new things, solving complex problems, investment in collective outcomes, etc
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoSo my question, to what degree does it have to match? I went to university because I had an interest specifically in games, media and HCI. I could talk about my interest in those things fairly easily. Yet the far majority of jobs in my area are oriented around web development in its most basic, CRUD form. More often than not, I can almost detect a hint of snobbism from the other party's side whenever I lightly hint at the fact I don't really care for web development in my free time, but recognize overlap between various fields. In extreme cases, I see the above on stack level as well, which is even worse. As if preference in stack defines who should work where, when a few stack combinations heavily dominate the market.